shabbat shalom 17.01.08

Hi everyone,

It is really winter here in Jerusalem this week, and it has been cold, dropping to near freezing at night. (Americans, you can laugh, but try that in a stone and concrete cottage with no central heating.) I had the woodstove going every night, and the cats all arranged in baskets around the fire. When I wake in the morning, after the woodstove got cold, I find half a dozen of them have migrated to my bed, and it is no small matter to shove them aside to get up. Then of course the first priority is to feed the cats, if I want peace to do anything else, and in this weather they are all quite hungry. Feeding time at the zoo, and then I can make my coffee and turn on the computer.

I lay low the early part of this week, with a colonoscopy on Monday. Just routine screening that everyone over 50 years old is supposed to do in this country. The test itself was not bad (a sedative and anaesthetic sent me immediately to a peaceful sleep, so I don't even remember it) but the three days preparation was horrid. First three days of no-fiber diet, then a laxative, then a "purgative" (= "Human Liquid Plumber"), and finally a self-inflicted enema. That's overkill. After my first dose of the purgative, I concluded I never, never will take that stuff again and skipped the second bottle. Gack. That stuff was invented by sadists.

I was also puzzled about the enema, never having done one before. Being a computer geek, I got on the Internet to find out exactly, well, how? You would not believe the number of web sites devoted to the erotic pleasures of enemas, both self induced and administered by a "partner". Even special sexy aromatic fluids to use, stuff like that. Uh well, I did get a couple useful detailed descriptions on how to, uh, do it (which actually worked fine) but having done it, I can affirm that there sure wasn't much erotic arousal in the operation as far as I was concerned. Just hoping to make it to the john before the enema did what enemas are supposed to do. Anybody who gets a sexual kick out of that must really love dysentery….

Having achieved the most squeaky clean colon I hope to ever have in my life, I passed the colonoscopy with flying colors and a vow of "Never Again", woke up from anaesthetic with my cell phone in hand, having made a few phone calls that I still don't remember making (hmm, I did that in blackouts as well….), and got the hell out as soon as my squeaky clean little butt would carry me…..Famished too, after a 30-hour fast. I don't normally go for street food, but two blocks down the road I was overpowered by the aroma of a shwarma stand and wolfed down a pita full of grilled meat with the greed of a starving polar bear. That put me right again, although I couldn't drive for the rest of the day due to the warnings about the anaesthetic.

Now it is back to routine office work. Bush left town and inflicted himself on the Saudi Arabians this week (our sympathies) so Jerusalem got normal again. Back to Kassam missiles hitting in the Negev , strikes hitting in the universities, and polticians trying to walk between the raindrops. It seems I will in fact have to teach this workshop on multivariate analysis next month, so I finally got serious about preparing it. I'll have a computer lab with 40 stations, and have to do a number of Powerpoint demonstrations of ordination and numerical classification.

Despite the fact I've been doing this since the 1970's, more than 30 years, I still get nervous cold feet and start wondering how to get out of it. Pure stage fright; if there is one thing I know how to do, it's multivariate analysis. At 54, I'm supposed to stop hiding in the toilet every time I have to give a lecture; this is ridiculous.

Nice little holiday coming up here in Israel , next Tuesday is Tu B'Shvat, the "New Year of the Trees". Originally it was simply the date from which the trees were aged, for taxation purposes in ancient times. In the Middle Ages it grew into a celebration of nature and fruitfulness. In modern Israel it developed into a celebration of agriculture and forestry, with symbolic tree planting, eating fruits of the trees that grow in Israel (dates, olives, pomegranates, and now oranges, apples, and Lord knows what else). Happy tree party. I love the overtly agricultural festivals; can't say I get much out of the philosophical/religious abstractions that Judaism developed from them but my primitive, nature and food-oriented mind does understand "celebrate wheat and barley harvest", "celebrate grape harvest", "celebrate almond trees in bloom" which are Shavuot, Sukkot and Tu B'Shvat respectively, in their original farming framework. I can get into those up to my elbows.

This year I will probably take the day off work and go down to the forestry service's tree nurseries, where they plan some events for Tu B'Shvat, then over to the cat shelter, where much help is still needed. Other folks can celebrate by reading Torah; I'll shovel cat shit and clean food bowls. That's also a form of worship, you know. If the weather is fair and the flowers are starting to come out, it may even be a more profound kind of worship.

Shabbat shalom,

Linda

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